The music scene may be segmented and polarised, but at the end of the day there’s nothing quite like a group hug, writes DAVE GRANEY.

I’m not the hugging type. Though I don’t mind other people getting into it. (Preferably not with me though. Steady on! Just a nod or a formal hand hold thanks.) From a distance, I love it. For instance, I once had R&B magazines from the ’70s and it had full-page ads from acts congratulating others on their chart positions and success. High fiving in full colour print. I thought it was great. Andrew Loog Oldham, when he was managing The Stones, did the same for Phil Spector, taking out an ad for Ike and Tina’s ‘River Deep Mountain High’ single. He was giving a “bravo” for the art and urging people to hear it. (It was a comparative flop for Spector in the US at the time.)

Brother and sisterhood. Comradeship. Camaraderie. Stickin’ together. I used to be alarmed at shows by younger acts when they thank each other for inviting them onto the bill or for opening the show. Some even say thanks for the thanks. Thanks. I got used to it and thought it was nice. In the early ’80s Melbourne scene it was different. Acts were very competitive and made a great show of snubbing and cutting each other in public, in those tiny inner-city scenes, when you’d pass in the street or see someone at a party. It was exhausting really. All we had was ourselves though. No streetpress or online stuff like this, or records being made. All you had was your attitude and your face. The way you walked it. Quite intimate and severe. I never got out of a lot of those bad habits. I expected people to turn ugly at any minute. You had to be hard boiled.

“There are so many clubs and groups to dodge! Though you have to walk into one eventually. All different, snobby, uptight kinds of rock scenes.”

Not all that long ago I was going to meet a friend, who had been out of the country, at what used to be The Punters Club. It was a place she knew the address of, and I’d played there a few times. It had since become a restaurant/bar/something without music. Anyway, they wouldn’t let me in because I was wearing a suit. It was a classy light summer suit. We went to the Cherry Bar later on and the same thing happened. “No suits,” the bouncer said. I protested that it was a flash set of threads. Eventually, they let me in, but you know, I didn’t want to be in there then! I was happy to be an outsider. “Less fuckin’ imponderables,” as Al Swearingen would say.

There was a reunion party of people who went to the Seaview Ballroom last weekend. Fuck, was I glad I had some gigs in Adelaide! It was a nice school to go to but I have seen too many horror movies set at those reunion type things. Carrie for one, though Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was good. “I invented post it notes!” Actually, I would have been neither missed or expected at that soiree. Even though The Moodists played and rehearsed there a lot and our bass player had his mail delivered there. I passed right through it and kept going.

There’s not many scenes that I touched ground on that I can feel for now. Perhaps the Piano Bar in the Prince of Wales because it was a place that was open whether there was music on or not, and the general raffish air of vice and indolence gave it a real whiff of brimstone. Music was in there on week nights, and the late nights when the drag show crowd appeared like vampires among the rock’n’roll people gave it an extra spark too. Something that no alcohol or cigarette company sponsorship could provide. Music was in there as a part of a rich underworld life. The few clubs and the cheap hotels around Darlinghurst around the same time were great too. You had a real feeling you were walking into rooms where people had been destroying themselves for generations.

It’s good to have severe standards, I think. I learned them years ago and grew to like them. They hold you up sometimes. Uptightness, why not? Would Miles have gone to a school reunion? Bob Dylan probably did. Prince would have, just to kick everyone’s ass at basketball.

There are so many clubs and groups to dodge, though you have to walk into one eventually. All different, snobby, uptight kinds of rock scenes. Occasionally you stumble upon a magical type of a crowd who all gathered from out of nowhere and it amazes you how people can still pull it together.

The shows in Melbourne by Them Crooked Vultures were an example. An actual supergroup with deep pull into a whole bunch of disparate areas got a real crazy gang together, people who probably wouldn’t normally stay in the same room in a big city like Melbourne. All kinds of guitar freaks and metal heads and prog nuts and pop people. Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Kyuss, QUOTSA and Led Zeppelin heads. The band filled Festival Hall a few times playing a set of material that was really just hanging together for the moment. They had the one album and it seemed to be understood that it might be all there would be. The music was the thing. They presented it with excitement and conviction. I had the album, but it wasn’t so burned into my brain that I knew exactly what was happening or going to happen. I’m sure a lot of people had the same feeling. It was a great scene to be a part of. Perhaps that was a hug?

“It’s good to have severe standards, I think. I learned them years ago and grew to like them. They hold you up sometimes. Uptightness, why not?”

When Alex Chlton played in Melbourne in the ’90s it was a real gathering of freaks. Though there was division within that as well. It was at the Continental in Greville Street, maybe 200 people? Some were there for the first two Big Star albums, some were there for their third, Sister Lovers. Some were there for Chilton’s solo album, Like Flies on Sherbet. He couldn’t have been all those things, and he just came out with a bass player and a drummer from New Orleans and played cool R&B tracks like ‘Tee Ni Nee Ni Nu’ all night. A funny thing happened when he pulled out an Italian pop song called ‘Tinta Rella De Luna’, just to push everybody out of his way a bit, and a whole lot of people sang along! That was a hug he couldn’t dodge. Later he said he heard all the requests for his old Big Star songs and if anybody wanted to get up and sing them the band would play them. Kim Salmon got up and sang ‘Holocaust’ and another fellow sang ‘My Rival’ and a few others too.

One of my favourite performers I ever saw was Alan Vega doing a solo set in Switzerland in 1990. I would have loved him doing anything. It was a small club in Lausanne. I was hanging around just to see him and there were a few dozen people in the place. He had a fellow called Phil Hawk (who played on his solos albums) on electric guitar DI’d straight into the desk and a young woman pressing “play” on a DAT machine that was on a pedestal. She looked cool and deadpan and swayed from side to side. Alan was a great influence and icon for me for many years and I was amazed to be actually seeing him. The setup with no amps or drums was so strangely wide open. He walked around freely, more like a stand-up comic than a singer. He pointed at a young couple and said, “You look fuckin’ great!” I inveigled my way backstage and found myself in his presence. I gave him a copy of my album, My Life On The Plains. He looked at it and yelled, “Australia! Its all comin’ together man!” He was so perfectly what I’d imagined him to be on and off the stage. I could do nothing but laugh at every declamatory statement he made. In that Australian way. Laughing. It’s what I do when people hug me.

Tracks magazine made me “brother from another scene” once in the ’90s. It was my favourite ever award – even though it was just a pithy caption to a small photo. I played in Hobart the other week and there were a bunch of surfers there from Adelaide. They were on a trip to the west coast. That’s dedication! They really dug my music and my lyrics and then they turned up a fortnight later, sitting on dragster bikes outside the gig in Adelaide. It really gave me a lift that those cats could see, and hear me through all the bullshit and static. And I consider those cats to be authentic types too. Surfing through life. Out in the open, looking for the big swells. Together.

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Dave Graney started to write songs in the post-punk period when ideology and self expression and mythology were all screwed up and meeting head on. He currently plies his trade in the Lurid Yellow Mist and recently released a solo album, Knock Yourself Out. His column appears monthly.